Cyberpunk 2077:
The anime was way better ngl
Cyberpunk is a open world shooter in a cyberpunk setting as the name implies, I would be lying if I said I enjoyed it, I think it's a pretty mediocre and messy game
The plot is about your protagonist accidently getting stuck with a chip in their head that allows her to see the spirit of johnny, a terrorist who lived 50 years ago. However, this is not sustainable as the protagonist is going to die unless they get the chip removed. The whole plot is the protagonist trying to remove the chip.
This by itself is not a bad concept, however it's not explored that much. In fact, most of the cyberpunk nature of the world isn't really explained. The game sells you on this idea of replacing parts of your body with mechanic implants, in fact the whole anime is about this, about the consequences of doing that and the biological limit. There is a lot you can do with this idea, and the game kinda hypes you up into expecting pretty crazy cybernetics. But that is really far from reality
This is really barely touched on the story, in fact, the only real thing that the story really uses is a fucking pdf viewer that everyone in the world has, you can load an usb in your head to see information and also connect to computers via your arm. The actual cybernetics are all very boring, you can't really go to any extremes, you can't just replace your hand with a fucking massive gun for example. The cybernetics in this game are just "you regen hp faster" or "you have increased movement speed after engaging in combat", and that cybernetic limit that the anime revolves around is only a gameplay mechanic, I don't think it's ever mentioned in the plot???, in fact, when you get a cybernetic that is required by the plot, guess what IT DOESN'T EVEN COUNT FOR THE FUCKING LIMIT
but well, you can hack other people's body, that's cool right?. Again, mostly a gameplay thing with very little impact on the story, hacks works as spell basically, you press tab, selet a enemy, and then choose from a menu if you want to apply a status effect or do damage.
You also have that cyberpunk arquitecture with lots of ads in buildings and stuff, but again, it's just something in the backgroud, it has no weight. The story of cyberpunk 2077 is one that really doesn't rely very hard on the setting at all which is surprising for a game called CYBERPUNK
In many ways it feels tone deaf, it feels like it's trying to do this homage to the cyberpunk genre by having a large portion of the night city population be japanese, so you have japanese writing and japanese themed zones, in fact you can get the bike from akira, but this game is nothing like akira. What makes akira akira isn't the bike or the general visuals, it's the story surrounding all of this weird tech and their consequences
in fact, it's so tone deaf that in night city, a dystopical american city, there are fucking PACHINKOS, something that would only make sense if gambling was banned but like what the fuck how would that ever fit into the setting
The game advertises itself as an choice-driven RPG, this is not the case at all. The only real choices you have in the game are just at the end mission and at the end mission of the DLC. And in fact, you often don't have much option in conversations where they give you multiple dialogue options because they're often than not very different at all. It's often like 4 different ways to say yes. There are also timed dialogue options, where you only have a very short span of time to read them and respond. What happens if you just decide not to answer?, nothing really, it either autoplays the choice that will progress the plot or the dialogue would continue as normal. For a game that markets itself as choice driven you kinda do feel a little bit powerless in what you can say.
There are also some dialogue choices that are locked behind skill points in certain skills. This make senses, for example in disco elysium your skill points don't only give you gameplay advantages but they also help you understand the game via it. In many ways, disco elysium is always rolling die to see if any of your skills activate and you get to learn more about a certain thing, maybe opening up new gameplay options. In cyberpunk this isn't really the case, not only because it doesn't matter if you choose that option or not, but because you can always see the option even if it's locked. And by reading what that dialogue option is, you learn about that part of the lore and you get that perspective even if your character shouldn't be able to know. So if an option is like "omg are you the guy that killed this other guy???" and that option is locked because your character shouldn't be able to know that, you, the player do end up learning that since you read the option and you now know that the guy that you're talking to killed the other guy, it's just that you can't get your character to say it
The game has so many gameplay systems and honestly none of them really matter at all. Like, you have like 4 different xp systems, one to unlock skill trees, one to unlock skills in those trees, one dlc one that is a separate skill tree that requires a different method of obtaining, and also "playstyle" specific XP, that gives you advantages in those playstyles, except it really doesn't matter, because when you kill enemies they often drop usbs that give you xp in the other playstyles you're not playing so like lmao. Thing is, none of the skills really impact the gameplay at all, they're not really transforming your playstyle, many of them are just stat buffs, and stat buffs don't matter when the enemies scale to your level, so if you become stronger, your enemies will also become equally as strong which means the gameplay experience at level 1 and max level isn't very drastic.
The game is very bloated in general, there are so many activities that you can do in the map but a lot of them aren't very engaging, the one I find most outrageous is the tarot cards, you just go to a place, scan a grafitti and you get a tarot card added to a menu. These don't really have an use. It feels like they just exist to pad the playtime if you want to do 100% and add more map markers to give the illusion of a city that is alive. In fact, the dlc skill system I mentioned is kinda identical to the graffitis, you go to a place, connect to a terminal, you have a new skill point, and it's just so boring
I get the vision of having A LOT to do in the city, so that you're walking along the road with no specific goal and there are so many things around you that you can get dragged into or engage with. But this isn't really how the game is played, you're not finding the activities naturally, you're opening a map, putting a marker on it and then driving to it. And in that context a lof of the activities feel very repetitive.
In fact, this also clashes with the plot. The whole plot is that you have a bomb in your brain that is about to expldoe and you need to remove it as soon as possible, in fact, during story missions your body will stop responding during scripted segments and it will show you that the protagonist is FUCKED but then the gameplay is totally different. You're killing hundreds of guys and taking billions of bullet without consequences. It's very funny that when it's a scripted segment the protagonist is dying and then you get to shoot guys and then you're in peak physical condition.
Your body is operating fine as long as you're not in the main story, it doesn't feel like you actually have a timer that you're racing against, you're not having to choose and pick what side quests you do to get you the best probabilities to survive, there is no rush or urgency at all. In fact, it's not only that the whole plot stops existing the moment you look away, it's that the game rewards you for doing things that would make no sense if you were actually playing in character, multiple endings of the base game are locked behind doing sidequests which as I said wouldn't make much sense to stop and do if you actually had a ticking bomb in your brain. This is peak ludonarrative dissonance. At least with the DLC it was framed as "this is going to help you remove the chip from your brain"
Bosses feel pretty boring, nothing much to say, in fact in the dlc, phantom liberty, they barely have bosses because I think they realized they're not the best part of the game. Also I find funny that a boss has like a helmet that disperses bullet and makes it really hard to hit them but such technology is not ever mentioned in the story at any other point
I also take issue with this game visuals. It generally doesn't look that striking, the only real segment I went like "woahhhhhhh that's cool" is like the ones where you're in like this digital world with this really weird camera effect, that part I liked, but the rest of the game just looks eh. I get that I was playing with the graphics on low but this is not a resolution problem, this is a general art direction problem.
There is also little to none graphical progression in terms of weapons and cybernetics. Often I would upgrade to a better gun only to find the model to be more rudimentary instead of cooler and more techonological. With the implants, there are characters that just have insane movespeed at times but there isn't really anything in their body that would make you instantly go like "oh this guy can do that"
Talking about the weapons, the gameplay defines that the actual damage and stats are mainly placed on the weapon, so why am I the only one with a good weapon while the other ones are carrying shit guns?, why do their guns instantly turn 20 times better when I pick them up?, I get this from a gameplay perspective but it's still peak ludonarrative dissonance.
About the DLC, probably best part of the game, the last mission was actually good, didn't like how the president of the US was pictured tho, as she was written basically the exact same way that you would write a leader of a corporation or anything, not to mention that she doesn't seem like a politician, and more like a heavily trained solider.
Played in C tier
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haven't seen the movie that abraker requested,
next, fallout 1
